Saturday, April 06, 2013

Saturday Snapshot: Playing School

This week I'm once again joining in on Alyce's great meme, Saturday Snapshot. Alyce from At Home with Books hosts this one, and the rules are simple:

Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.

This week I thought I'd share some pretty funny items I uncovered recently, some memorabilia from childhood. My younger sister and I used to play an elaborate game of "school" together -- we created class lists of 20-30 names each for our numerous classes, we made up teacher I.D. cards for what I now realize would be a huge staff (using Sears catalogues and local flyers to cut out faces for each I.D., and creating addresses and birthdates, setting our school in the fictional city of Cannada), we even typed out correspondence with parents and the school board on wee slips of paper. Some of these are great examples of an early customer service ethic....or not....

We were really into our St. Lawrence School activities. My sister (now the Trekking Teacher) was always a classroom teacher, while I preferred to be an administrator, sending out letters, drawing up curriculum and so on. Kind of funny how we both turned out! I don't quite remember how old we were when we stopped playing this (early teens I think), but I clearly still have some of the materials from those days, and finding them brought back some very amusing recollections. Hope you enjoy them too.

Here is the staff! All nicely named and photographed...almost

Lauralee Pix (of "Charolotte" Road) was my sister's alterego. You can see she chose one face and stuck with it! Poor Francine Waite. That was me, and I went through facial changes regularly. I'm kind of sad that when we stopped playing this game I was between faces. Now I will never be immortalized in 80's catalogue style :( Although I did somehow have a presentiment that I'd move to Montreal...

Do these guys look familiar? A rose by any other name...


Some very polite notes to various parents. I don't know where we came
up with this stuff! I'm particularly fond of the missive to Mrs. Googliment.
(click to embiggen)

26 comments:

  1. This is great. I love to be reminded about the elaborate games I made as a child. I wonder if kids do that today? I hope so. Are you sure Mrs. Googliment's son wasn't chained to the tetherball pole, cause that's what I heard too. Here's Mine

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    1. LOL! Poor Evan Googliment, always taking the brunt of everything ;)

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  2. That's so hilarious and adorable. You and your sister must have been very close, to play together like that even into your young teens.

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    1. Yes, we were (and are) close. I was even such a good sister that you may notice on the ID cards above that I allowed her to be older than me as a teacher!

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  3. I just love when I go through things and come up with such treasures. I'm doing that at the moment myself!

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    1. I hope you'll share any discoveries with us via Saturday Snapshot if you find some of your own treasures!

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  4. How creative you and your sister were! I love how you put together all the details and it looks like you had a lot of fun and great memories!

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    1. I recall it being a lot of fun -- spending our summer holidays playing school...

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  5. Omg hilarious!! I love how inventive and detailed you guys were as kids! I especially love the letter about the handwriting not being legible. Lol!

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    1. Thanks! I found it pretty funny to reread these notes -- I guess I was already a handwriting snob at an early age, LOL.

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  6. Glad to meet another Canadian in the blogosphere. Yes, I'm from the Western part of Canada, in Alberta. Love your blog design! Amusing post you have here. Good to have a sister to play with. Thanks for stopping by Ripple Effects.

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    1. Nice to see a fellow Canadian visiting here, too! Thanks for commenting, and I was lucky to have such fun with my sister.

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    1. Haha, yes, it was. We were slightly obsessed with this school :)

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  8. Crying laughing remembering this...those were great times & will always be treasured!! I remember giving my "invisible" (to others, but not to me!) students detention for getting out of their seat and/or switching seats, and talking! lol. I remember Francine having those long , dark locks and bright red lipstick. Yes, we were very creative, but also very patriotic! all of our addresses are Cdn. places & this was even before there was a suburb called "Kanata". :) thank you for sharing!! There are even many St. Lawrence schools too-incl. one in Cornwal, ON Maybe we should create our own "real" school??

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    1. I think it would be pretty weird if you ended up teaching at a real St. Lawrence school! Fun times for sure.

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  9. What fun! Your photos are treasures. My sisters and I played school when we were growing up; my older sister always played the part of the strict school marm, who made us wear our hair in severe pony tails.

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    1. I don't know what it is about playing school, perhaps because we're all so familiar with it to begin with. My sister was the disciplinarian, handing out detentions and so on... thank goodness she's grown out of that as a real teacher, haha.

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  10. Sounds like a lot of fun!! I don't remember doing anything like that when I was young.

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    1. It was loads of fun. I loved inventing the names and stories behind all the teachers and students.

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  11. We have a blackboard on our garage wall and my kids would play classroom in the summer. Alas, they are all grown up and the blackboard is empty...no longer used for messages since we all have cells! Thanks for visiting my Bear With Me blog!

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    1. We would have loved a blackboard to play with -- we tacked up some National Geographic maps and posters on the basement walls to make it feel like a classroom, but no luck with a blackboard!

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  12. I don't remember being anywhere near as creative as a child!

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  13. This brings back memories of playing library with my sister. A bunch of our old books from our childhood have old fictional library cards in the back, very similar to your ID cards.

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    1. My original Anne of Green Gables has a spine label and book pocket, both written in pink ink (!) and attached with yellowing scotch tape. Fun to hear that you also marked up your books that way ;)

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  14. How creative and fun! I'll have to ask my sister if she remembers anything so creative for us. :-)Thanks for sharing.

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Thanks for stopping by ~ I always enjoy hearing your comments so please feel free to leave some!